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# Better late than...

- Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 17:34:02 PDT
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    One really useful thing that allowing foo.bar="burfle" to implicitly call
    set_property_value(foo, "bar", "burfle") and foo.bar to implicitly call
    get_property_value(foo, "bar") (and thus to allow for wrappers) would be
    the ability to easily implement 'inflatable' objects, i.e. objects whose
    data is stored out of the MOO database somewhere until it is actually
    needed.

    This is not impossible now in a limited way, as people have pointed out,
    it is easy enough to implement '$note:get_property' access verbs to
    particular properties you know IN ADVANCE you will want to deflate.
    Unfortunately, (a)  you have to maintain and debug a lot more code as you
    manually recast objects in your database to inflate, or (b) you have to
    know in advance which objects will be getting large on you, which often
    isn't possible.

    As a second benefit of this proposed change, allowing individual database
    designers to decide what sort of encapsulation of properites suits their
    needs seems a Good Thing.  Implementing private data without having it
    dependent on permissions, or allowing no access whatsoever to properties
    except by verbs on that objects ... while you may not want to force such
    encapsulation schemes on everybody, I wish it were *possible* to implement
    such a thing effectively with a little server support.

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